Support with financial difficulties

What we will do

When you contact us, we’ll listen to you to understand your situation. We’ll talk through your finances including your income, expenses and any financial concerns you may have for the future and discuss how we can help you to get back on track.

Our specialist team will consider your individual circumstances, current situation and how much you can afford to pay. They will then determine which options will be most suitable for you and support you in getting back on track.

We might be able to:

Change the date that you make your mortgage payment

Your payment and interest are added to your account on the 1st of the month and payments made after this date incur additional interest. You can change your payment date to any date within the month. However, you are obliged to make a mortgage payment each month, so when changing your payment date, it could result in 2 mortgage payments being made quite close together.

Reduced payments

We can reduce or stop your payments for a little while, to get you to a point where you can start full payments again. This will show as arrears on your credit records, and we’ll need to arrange for you to repay the missed payments once your situation improves. We'll continue to charge interest on the mortgage even when payments are reduced or suspended.

A temporary payment of just the interest

We might be able to move you temporarily to an interest-only mortgage. This will reduce your payments but it’s important to remember that you won’t be paying back any of the original amount borrowed, so you’ll need to repay it in the future which may mean your payments increase.

Allow you to pay back your mortgage over a longer term

Spreading the repayments over a longer period of time may lower your monthly payments. However, it means that you’ll have a mortgage for longer and pay more interest than you would have done originally.

Impacts on your credit file

If the arrears on your account are equal to one monthly payment or more at the end of the month, this will be reported to credit reference agencies and could have a negative impact on your credit rating making it more difficult for you to borrow money in the future. Lenders will use information submitted to credit reference agencies when making decisions on financial products and could mean you are rejected for future credit applications for products such as loans, credit cards or hire purchase agreements.

This may also make it more difficult for you to get a mortgage in the future and could also affect anyone who is financially associated with you (for example through a joint bank account or credit account) and impact their ability to get credit.